This is a memoir of his life from the absolutely rock bottom poverty of rural Alabama to his Pulitzer Prize-winning sojourn as a reporter for the New York Times. He literally wrote his way out of starvation with barely a high school education.

The man has an incredible gift with words and could rule the world with his storytelling. I didn't want to finish the book and have to leave his company, so I savored every chapter with such names as "A man who buys books because they're pretty" or "If you got to kill somebody, better it ain't family" or "Dining out with no money, and living with no life". These are the people and the stories he finds and does justice to. These are the people he knows and understands the way most of us cannot, except through the insight of his words.

But most of all, this book is the story of his mother and her continuing influence on his life. We seldom have the opportunity to meet the women who struggle; who persevere; who survive in the shacks and the trailers we ignore as we speed down rural highways; who raise their children with nothing; who disappear from this life without a whisper.

Here's what Bragg says in the prologue:

	"The biggest reason for writing this story is to set one thing

	straight from now on. My momma believes that she failed, that her three

	sons, being all she has ever had, did not get enough of the fine things 

	in life because she was our mother.... But the truth is that I am proud 

	of who and what I am, just as proud of being the son of a woman who picked

	cotton and took in ironing as I am of working for a place like the New York

	Times. I have always believed that one could not have been without the other. My 

	job has carried me to see things seldom seen by a country boy, without a

	white-trash, first-pick draft notice, to the other side of the world and

	into some of the same columned mansions where my momma used to clean

	bathrooms. When I was a man of thirty-three they even let me into Harvard,

	and I was not holding a mop. When I was thirty-six, I won the highest honor

	our profession bestows. I hope she blames herself for that, too."

This is a real gem of a book that is written with heartbreaking honesty and amazing word poems that will leave you laughing out loud and no doubt shedding a few tears. I learned a lot about myself from observing through Bragg's eyes, and a lot about a world I've had the good fortune to not inhabit. I wouldn't be surprised if this book brings him a National Book Award, but most of all I hope it brings him some peace - he done good, real good, and his momma can be proud.

What I like about receiving Reading is that it often gives me ideas of what books are out there that I may want to pursue, as well as gets me to thinking about what I've recently enjoyed (or not). It also alerts me to books in which I will obviously have no interest, notwithstanding someone else's enthusiastic endorsement.

For instance, after years of rarely reading fiction because of being disappointed too often, Reading got me to dip my toes into the mystery genre, and I have much enjoyed both Sandra West Powell's and Sue Grafton's series (I'm only through "E") as my "in between", easy read, fun books. (Well, there are always murders and such, but hey, it's fiction.) On the other hand, I don't think I'll be heading back to ancient Rome anytime soon to visit Marcus Didius Falco.

I also have really appreciated discovering Jane Smiley (can never find her latest in at the library, so am waiting for the paperback) and Jane Hamilton and then all of Oprah's talk about Toni Morrison got me to pick up her books again, which are always a fascinating, enlightening challenge. Oh, let's not forget Louise Erdrich - I had been reading her all along.

But, I have another non-fiction book to talk about - I seem to want to write about biographies when I contribute. Anyway, Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time is a really extraordinary look at the Roosevelts (as in Eleanor and Franklin) during WW II.

Over the last thirty years, I have read most of the recent biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and some of Franklin's, so I came to this book with a lot of understanding and knowledge. But Goodwin focuses in just on the war years and had access to papers and diaries (such as the White House ushers' diaries and logs) that literally take us through every week of five years with marvelous prose, weaving a captivating tapestry of those days and all the players on the world stage in those dramatic times. The White House was literally like a boarding house for years, with even Churchill and the Norwegian royal family taking up residence now and then.

And I've never read a better portrait of the complicated relationship between ER and FDR. Goodwin also provides us with an overview of the course of WW II from the American point of view that I found fascinating (not having read a lot of histories of war, as such). Hey, there are even a lot of great pictures!

And, I have one more reason that this was a memorable book for me, and that is that I had the chance to share it with my mother, reading parts aloud over the weeks she was with us last Christmas. I highly recommend that you do this with someone who lived through that time as an adult. You learn amazing things about their lives, memories that are stimulated by events, and they may learn amazing things about what was happening in their world unbeknownst to them. Mom was even confronted by some obviously false memories that left her puzzling (mostly in regards to the timing of things). This truly is a wonderful way to learn more about both the political and the familial past that so color our worlds of today.